(April 5) Had Holocaust deniers from the world over been allowed to converge on Beirut earlier this week, they would have devastatingly disfigured the face-lifted Arab image. This is why they were kept out.

Nevertheless, fiendishly hypocritical Arab criteria allow Holocaust justification and Holocaust denial to thrive simultaneously.

Yasser Arafat's sidekick, Knesset member Ahmed Tibi, revived the old canard that the real Holocaust victims were Arabs, whom a guilt-ridden West saddled with the unwanted Jewish state. In other words, the Arabs paid Europe's penalty despite their absolute innocence.

Is this why the Arab world harbored so many Nazi war criminals, including the infamous Alois Brunner? Or does Arab hostility predate WWII? And is there a link between Arab aspirations then and now?

There may be powerful motives for obscuring that link. Ignorance facilitates the cover-up of still- unaltered propensities and purposes. Hence the Arabs' Holocaust record remains ever-relevant.

Were they indeed blameless bystanders?

Right after the 1942 Allied victory in El Alamein, Jerusalem's grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, took to the airwaves and broadcast in Arabic from Berlin. At that time he already was "prime minister" of a pan-Arab government formed in the German capital. His foreign minister was exiled Iraqi leader Rashid Ali al-Kilani and his war minister, Fawsi al-Kaukji.

Husseini called on his numerous disciples throughout the Middle East not to lose heart though their greatest hope - Rommel's conquest of Eretz Yisrael - was foiled. The mufti planned a triumphant return with the conquering Axis forces, and the construction of a death camp outside Nablus to implement the final solution of the Jewish problem in this region.

Despair after the Desert Rat's rout was immense, but Husseini wouldn' t give up. "Arise, o sons of Arabia," he exhorted his avid pro-Nazi followers. "Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion. That will save our honor."

In late 1944, Husseini still sponsored a last-ditch effort to trigger another Arab rebellion.His agents, a mixed German-Arab commando crew, parachuted here. Their first mission was poisoning Tel Aviv's wells.

Husseini arrived in Berlin three years earlier, after escaping the British. There he became Hitler's personal guest. The fuehrer granted him a prolonged personal audience, and the two reached a perfect meeting of the minds on how to solve the Jewish problem. Husseini was put up in a large house on Berlin's Klopstock Street, to which the SS referred as "the Jewish Institute."

With good reason. Until 1939 it was a Zionist-oriented Hebrew school. There must have been particular perverse pleasure in lodging the mufti precisely there. He thereafter referred to his new residence as "The Research Institute on the Jewish Problem in the Moslem World."

The Germans regarded Husseini as worth investing in. Various Nazi establishments competed for his affections. The Foreign Ministry paid him the then monthly equivalent of over $10,000, when the dollar was almighty. This sum was more than matched by the SS from its sonderfund resources, which consisted of assets robbed from Jews, often before their execution.

Again, the perverse pleasure must have been considerable.

Husseini's first Third Reich port of call was SS chief Heinrich Himmler's headquarters. Himmler took Husseini under his personal wing. He not only organized tours for him to Auschwitz, but sponsored and financed his Moslem clerical academy in Dresden. The graduates were to spearhead Nazi rule in Moslem lands.

Husseini was in charge of pro-German and antisemitic propaganda for Arabs and Moslems everywhere. He recruited Bosnians and other Moslem volunteers, who were to cleanse newly-occupied areas of "hostile elements," concentrate Jews for transport, and operate the projected death machine in Palestine - in the manner Ukrainians did the dirty work in Eastern Europe.

The SS interest in the mufti preceded the war. It financed his uprising here between 1936-39. In 1937, Adolf Eichmann visited this country to reconnoiter the Zionist endeavor and meet the mufti, but the British allowed him only a 48-hour stay. Eventually Himmler introduced Husseini to Eichmann. Thereafter the mufti became a frequent caller at Eichmann's office. The two got along famously. They shared the goal of exterminating all Middle Eastern Jews.

This is backed by ample documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials.

At the end of 1942, Eichmann ordered 10,000 Jewish children sent from Poland to Theresienstadt. The Red Cross offered to trade German civilians for them.Husseini got wind of the scheme and protested vehemently to Himmler, warning him that the little Jews would soon become big Jews.

The exchange was cancelled.

Husseini is moreover "credited" with having personally foiled any compromise on the fate of Hungarian Jewry at the very end of the war.

In his memoirs he wrote: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.' "

After the war, Husseini was declared a wanted war criminal. He fled to France, and from there reached safety in Egypt, joining a host of nefarious Nazis who continued maintaining a network of espionage, sabotage, and virulent antisemitism from Arab havens.

The mufti, who was deeply mourned by the masses when he died in 1974, still remains revered. Arafat and Faissal Husseini are both his blood kin. Neither repudiated him nor renounced his teachings.

A few weeks ago, an official PA communique, reprinted in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, accused Israelis of "murdering tots and elderly Arabs mercilessly. Jews tear open the bellies of pregnant women and rip out the fetuses, claiming this is the commandment of the God of Israel, which he ordered the People of Israel to fulfill."

The logical remedy must be the mufti's recipe for saving Arab honor and pleasing Allah.

The spirit of the man from Klopstock Street still hovers over Gaza. That's why baby Shalhevet was murdered.

This is the 2nd of two parts. Click here for part 1